


all the waters coming up so fast

by saltstreets



Category: Football RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-27
Updated: 2015-03-27
Packaged: 2018-03-19 22:58:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3627468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltstreets/pseuds/saltstreets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Xabi dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all the waters coming up so fast

**Author's Note:**

> With the charity match in LITERALLY! TWO! DAYS! I’ve been unceremoniously dragged back into Xabi/Stevie and so please accept this humble offering of.....whatever this is.
> 
> Thanks to my better half [Sharon](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Anemoi/pseuds/Anemoi/works) for always being ready to shed a tear (hundreds of tears) over football, and also for beta’ing this and assuring me that it was actually somewhat comprehensible. <3 <3
> 
> Title is from Pink Rabbits by The National.

 

 

Xabi dreams.

His body becomes permeable, water rushing in and around him, sweeping him back and tumbling him over and over until he doesn’t know which way is up or where he is, and he finds himself washed out to sea.

The sea is, unsurprisingly, Anfield.

He is left there, flooded out onto the grass, the ocean of the empty stands rising above and around. There’s a rushing in his ears but he can’t tell if it’s the roar of the invisible crowds or the crush of the hundred miles of water above his head, waves breaking on the beach. He gasps for air, flattened on his hands and knees, trying to stabilise himself in this world. The stadium looms, a fishbowl.

But the sea is Anfield. Of course it is. Do all rivers not lead to the sea? Do all paths not bring him back here, again and again?

Even less surprising is the fact that Stevie is there, standing at the centre spot, not ten metres away from where Xabi is kneeling on the grass just outside the circle. Of course Stevie is here. The Anfield of Xabi’s mind is incomplete without him, and this _is_ the Anfield of Xabi’s mind, buried here carefully, perfect and preserved.

Perfect and preserved- because there is Stevie, and it’s the Stevie that he knew eight, nine, ten years ago, Smiling and scrawny around the ankles, clean-shaven and with substantially fewer worry lines creasing his forehead. Xabi doesn’t have to touch his own face to know that he, on the other hand, is still today’s Xabi after he traded in red for white for red and white.

“Xabi,” Stevie says, as if it’s nothing out of the ordinary to meet your years-older friend in a dream-like Anfield deep under an undisclosed subconscious ocean. “How’s things?”

Xabi doesn’t have an answer for a moment, so he just looks up, up at the rippling stadium and remembers. He smiles. “My memory is far better than I’d thought. Look at this place.”

Stevie grins. “Sure mate, believe that if y’will. But you obviously haven’t seen a proper photo of me in _years._ ”

“I’ve seen photos. I’m just not pulling all the strings here. Or at least, not consciously.”

“Lookit you, all accepting of your present circumstance,” Stevie says, sing-song. “Not going to get all snippy ‘bout reality, are we?”

“I don’t see why I would,” Xabi rejoins, quietly. “I can’t think of anything here that disagrees with me.”

Stevie’s grin softens then into a smile, a bit sad and far more appropriate to the real, older Steven Gerrard than this projection of youth past. “Yeah, I know.”

They stand there in silence for just a moment, letting the stadium settle around them. It’s the perfect silence of familiarity borne of years past, a smooth pebble polished to a sheen. Xabi can feel the quiet moving like the waves above, and wonders briefly if this is the dream mechanics at work, this rhythmic back-and-forth of ebbing words and flowing water.

Water. Anfield is the sea, but there’s another ocean up above in the world of consciousness. Another ocean that’s important.

“You’re going to America.” Xabi says, his sleeping mind bringing out the thought with far more clarity and calm than it ever could while he was awake.

Stevie nods. He’s still smiling. “I’m going to America.”

“Why are you leaving Liverpool?” his voice is still the steady baseline polite that it always is, but he’s fighting to keep the quaver out that keeps slipping insidiously in at the backs of syllables.

“You left Liverpool,” Stevie says, and it’s not an accusation or a complaint or a defence: it’s just a fact. A statement. Xabi had left Liverpool. It’s such a gentle thing to say, and it is in itself an answer. Stevie doesn’t need Xabi to explain because this Stevie here, this Stevie _is_ Xabi. This is the Stevie that Xabi has conjured up from the depths of his memory, preserved perfection in amber, a Stevie with both his boyishness of 2005 and complete understanding of what came after. A Stevie who didn’t need Xabi’s excuses or protestations because he _knows, he knows._

Xabi answers him anyway. “It’s not the same.”

“No, it really isn’t.” Stevie agrees because of course he would. It’s _not_ the same. The circumstances of his position had changed and Xabi was Xabi- he had had to go in the end. But Stevie isn’t just Stevie. Stevie is himself and Liverpool and Anfield all rolled into one frame with stocky shoulders squared against the world and knobbly knees and crinkles at the corners of his eyes. Stevie leaving Liverpool is like the Earth slipping out of its atmosphere.

“I guess I just wasn’t good enough to be a one-club man,” says Stevie with a slightly self-deprecating edge to his voice and a tiny twisting grin. “But somehow I think people might still imagine me as one. Wouldn’t you say?”

Xabi has to smile at that because it’s true: oddly enough, Steven Gerrard is leaving Liverpool and yet will always _be_ Liverpool. “I _would_ say. And not just because it’s my subconscious supplying your words in the first place.”

“You’re terribly eloquent tonight, Xabs.”

“It’s because we’re speaking Spanish.”

Stevie raises an eyebrow. “Are we now.” His accent is unmistakably his own, and yet underneath the words, a close listener would discern a rhythm that didn’t match with the coarse Scouse English.

“Of course we are: it’s _my_ dream.” Xabi grins teasingly. “Don’t be so ridiculous as to think that a few years in your gloomy little country would be enough to have me dreaming in your language. Nobody’s _that_ charismatic.”

And if Stevie doesn’t mention that the cause in that sentence had started off with being England and ended by being himself, well then Xabi’s subconscious might just be a little bit kinder than it could’ve been.

“Do you remember the last time we were here, just the two of us?” Stevie says abruptly, and Xabi looks at him sharply. “What?”

“When we snuck in that night, kicked a ball about and then-”

“Yes, I remember.” Xabi cuts him off, an edge of harshness in his voice. He _does_ remember. He remembers Stevie pushing him up against the goal post and whispering in his ear, hands between them with fingers spread on his stomach, breath a hot puff in the cold night air. _Tell me I’m reading this wrong. Tell me you don’t want this._ Stevie had said, his voice a low hoarse rumble. _Tell me to stop._

“I remember that but _you_ shouldn’t,” Xabi says now, bleakly, “Because _that_ was a _dream_. Never happened.”

It had been after a particularly brutal loss against Man City and Xabi hadn’t cut himself off after his usual three drinks. He had slept poorly and dreamt vividly.

Stevie grins at him from where he stands and for the first time the grin isn’t the friendly, open expression that Xabi knows so well. This time there is something a little bit- well, a little bit undeniably _off_ about it. There are too many teeth, and not enough smile lines wrinkling up around Stevie’s eyes and Xabi is reminded suddenly with a jolt that this _isn’t_ Stevie. This mirage of ten years ago conjured up by his subconscious, fed on a steady diet of regret and repression. A memory shoved into the back of his mind, overthrown by sunny Madrid and the rush of the field and now standing here before him, not-Stevie as he never was but always is whenever Xabi imagines him.

Not-Stevie grins at him. He still hasn’t move from the centre spot. “Yeah, ‘course it was a dream. But so’s this. And I remember it, Xabs, seeing as it was me what was there.”

And he’s a little bit different than he was a few moments ago: a little more polished around the edges. Shoulders a bit broader, eyes a bit bluer, teeth a bit straighter.

Something has shifted almost imperceptibly. If Xabi were on a sailboat he would have felt it in the tug of the sheets, asking to be adjusted. He would have seen it in the altered ripples on the water, moving towards him, marking the invisible rush of winds changing.

But Xabi isn’t on a sailboat. Xabi is deep under the surface, deep on the ocean floor.

Xabi is at Anfield. Xabi is dreaming.

The Kop ripples. Not-Stevie looks up without much curiosity, the expression of a man about to comment on changing weather. (And Xabi knows _that_ expression well. The topic made up about 60% of all English conversation.)

Sure enough: “Looks as though you’re in for a bit of turmoil, Xabi,” Not-Stevie says. “You were always so unruffled but I guess everyone has their moments.”

“Turmoil?” Xabi asks, cautiously. He’s not sure if this is a lucid dream or just a peculiarly metaphysical one, and he doesn’t want to take any chances with this place.

“Yeah, turmoil.” Not-Stevie replies almost absently, scuffing his boot against the turf. “You might call it a nightmare.”

And with that, the stadium is suddenly full of people. They don’t queue in, they don’t arrive, they simply are: the stands are crowded, there are cheers and whistles and roars and people as though they’ve always been there, waving scarves and shouting unintelligibly. There are people on the pitch, too: players. Xabi hadn’t taken notice of what he’d been wearing before so he’s unsure if he simply hadn’t realised he was wearing his old Liverpool kit or if it was a new development in the dream. He’s in the familiar red jersey and there are other players all around him, players whose faces he can’t quite make out. There’s rapid motion and instinctively Xabi joins, moving quickly up the field in what he can only hope is the right direction. It must be because he hears his name being shouted, “Xabi! Xabi!” And there, there he can see Stevie dashing up parallel to him across the pitch, approaching the box. “Xabi!”

Xabi becomes suddenly aware that he has possession. The ball is at his feet, as sure as it’s ever been, and Stevie is running into the box, shouting for a pass.

He tries to pass the ball, he really does. He can see exactly where he should place it, exactly where it must curl at Stevie’s feet to be carried forward into the back of the net. It’s a perfect set-up, all he has to do is pass the ball.

He cannot pass the ball. He tries and he tries to pass but cannot make the connection between the will and his foot and suddenly he’s been dispossessed, he doesn’t know how or by who but he no longer has the ball and finds himself sprawled on the turf. He is struggling to get back up and back into play when Stevie enters his field of view, standing over him looking hurt. “Why didn’t you pass to me, Xabs? I was open. I was open and everything.”

 _I know,_ Xabi wants to tell him. _I could see. It would have been perfect._ But his mouth isn’t cooperating and all that comes out is nonsense syllables that could’ve been an imitation of Spanish by someone who didn’t know a word of the language.

Stevie frowns. “C’mon mate, you know I don’t speak Spanish.”

 _You_ are _speaking Spanish, this is my dream,_ Xabi wants to protest, _and anyway this – this is nothing._ He struggles to find words, any words in any language but he has none. He’s lost Spanish, he’s lost English, he would even settle for some of his crooked, not-quite-there German but there’s nothing.

He tries the last resort left to dreamers robbed of their voices: he tries screaming.

He takes in a gasp of air, filling his lungs- and chokes. Chokes on seawater rushing in: Anfield has crumpled in on itself like a paper bag and Anfield is the ocean and the ocean is _here,_ water where he had been breathing air only moments before, tumbling him head over heels until he doesn’t know anything, not even his own name, his own self.

Xabi tries kicking upwards, trying to get to the surface that must be there, be somewhere. He fights against his waterlogged kit dragging him down, he fights against the burn of the salt in his eyes and the absence of oxygen in his lungs. He kicks until his legs ache and he’s sure he can’t hold his breath any longer, and the last bubble of air is slipping from between his lips, escaping up to the surface still miles above him.

“Did you love me?” asks Stevie, floating next to him, seemingly unbothered by the lack of air. “Do you think you might have loved me?”

Xabi looks at him helplessly and suddenly finds that he can speak. He opens his mouth and looks at Stevie- _no_ , he looks at not-Stevie, adrift in the ocean.

“No,” he says, firmly. “I didn’t. I didn’t love _you._ ”

Not-Stevie looks taken aback, his overly blue eyes widened in a moment of surprise. And then he grins and this time it’s a proper Steven Gerrard grin again, all wrinkly forehead and scrunched nose, face slightly misshapen and eyes too sunken and ears too...ear-like. “There you go, mate,” not-Stevie (Stevie?) tells him, fondly. “Knew you’d get there in the end.”

Xabi tries to respond but when he opens his mouth he finds his lungs full of water. He can’t breathe, he can’t see, he can’t speak-

He wakes.

He’s drenched in sweat and breathing hard as though he’s just been running for a full ninety minute match. Xabi sits there, back straight upright, until his breathing begins to normalise again. The taste of saltwater lingers at the back of his throat but he doesn’t take note of it.

The hotel room is dark and still. He can hear a few cars driving by on the street several storeys down. Lviv. They’re still in Lviv.

Xabi groans and presses the heels of his hands against his closed eyes. A goalless match and he’d been carded. He’d been _fucking_ carded. He wonders absently in the back of his mind if it had been these frustrations that had brought on the dream, or if- ah. Yes. The dream.

His waking mind turns its focus on the dream, details coming crawling back. Under the ocean at Anfield, the match that went wrong and Steven Gerrard, or someone very like him, calling for a pass.

There’s something else, something else had happened and Xabi tries to recall but it hangs back shyly, hiding just out of sight and out of grasp until he gives up trying, the ghost of it slipping away even he feels a realisation of some sort slotted neatly away in his heart and mind, a satisfied puzzle piece.

He smiles slightly into the dark. Anfield was the sea. Of course Anfield was the sea.

It’s late and Xabi slides back into sleep with pleasant ease. He doesn’t dream again.


End file.
